Saturday Stats

Miles ridden this week: 47
Average calories per day: 1862 (I ate a lot over the weekend)
Pounds lost: 3
Current weight: 242.5 lbs (110.2 kg)
Total weight loss since 3/26/10: 48.5 lbs.

Phase 1 of the cleanse is over and I'm really glad.  I'm dying to eat food I can chew!  I'm also looking forward to my brain coming back on line.  I've been having some chicken every day so that there wouldn't be dizziness and falling down but now I get to add rice cakes, fruit and vegetables to my shakes and chicken.  I can't even tell you how excited I am about crunching on a rice cake. 
I do three days of a combination of shakes and food and then two weeks of fewer shakes and more food.  All the foods I'll be eating are ones that have a reputation for being non-allergic.  Hopefully, my bloodwork will be back soon and we can figure out what I actually should be eating.
I hope I'm less dopey and uncoordinated today.  I was planning to ride my bike over to the Common Cod Fiber Guild meeting last night but had spent the day knocking over so much stuff and forgetting things (like how to spell) that I thought it would be a better idea to stay home :-(

Lighter

Today, I feel better.  Thanks everyone for your encouragement.  Tuesday and yesterday were tough but I felt the love. 
I'm still a little loopy which is why I haven't replied to any email.  Hoping to get to it tomorrow.  The only way I can describe how I feel is lighter.  Not lighter like I weigh less but like something that was pushing down on me has lifted.  I still had the afternoon sleepies but nothing like the past couple of days.  I'm also not as hungry which is nice.  I have one more day of having mostly shakes to eat then Saturday I can start eating real food again.  I'll keep you posted as things progress.

Dragging

I'm in the second day of the detox and I'm dragging.  The doctor told me that my symptoms would increase for the first few days of this and he wasn't kidding.  I'm trying to clean my room and it is pathetic.  I've cleaned less the 20% of the room and I need a nap!  I wouldn't bother but the exterminator is coming Friday (found mouse dropping in my recycling last week, eww!) and I have to tidy up some.  I guess I just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other for the next couple of days and then I'll feel better.  At least, I hope so!

Cycling the North Shore

Stef and I had a great ride today.  We decided to join the North Shore Cyclists' Sunday ride.  We took the 45 mile route which was just beautiful.  We didn't get to spend much time with the NS Cyclists since we are slow and got dropped pretty quickly.  The time we did spend with them was very pleasant and we felt very welcome.  The group is nice, organized and had a very good cue sheet which was easy to follow.  This was good since we spent most of the ride on our own.  This was actually fine with me.  Riding in a group on a tandem can be tricky.  We go uphill slower and downhill so much faster than everyone else that riding with a group that is going an equivelant average speed ends up being a fairly nerve wracking game of leap frog.  We also take turns wider and take longer to get going from a stop.  I would like to increase our group riding skills as time goes on but it will mean increasing our average speed quite a bit.  This is happening for us, but slowly.  Used to be we averaged 11-12 mph on a regular ride.  Our last three rides, though, we've been averaging 13.5+.  This is exciting stuff, especially considering how crummy I've been feeling.  Riding has been getting to be the only time I feel really good lately.  It just sucks the life out of me for the rest of the time.  Hopefully, things will improve once I de-toxify.
I'll be really interested to see how next season shapes up.  Right now, I'm only ten pounds heavier than I was the year I did three centuries and rode my bike down here and back from where I was living in Maine (378 mile round trip done in four days).  I was also eighteen years younger but we won't talk about that.  So, if I can lose a bunch more weight over the winter, who knows what next season will bring.

Toxic

I had a long visit with Dr. Rothfeld yesterday and it was very interesting.  I was all set to tell him how difficult and weird things have been since I saw him last except I didn't need to.  He pretty much told me.  He'd talked to the nurse practitioner I'd seen three weeks ago and knew that I was feeling fatigued, moody and ill and that my weight was zinging up and down for no apparent reason.  Why?  I have the type of body that is very bad at clearing toxins.  What has all the weight loss been doing?  Dumping toxins into my system.  He said that my body's default way of dealing with toxins, since I was a little kid, is to store them in fat rather than moving them out of my body.  This explains why I had been getting consistently more overweight as time went on.  It also explains why, when I have lost weight in the past, I feel crappier and crappier and hungrier and hungrier until I finally give up and start eating more.  I've always noticed that when I start eating more after dieteing for a while, I immediately feel better.  It is hard to feel like dieting is good for you when you feel like crap the whole time and only start to feel good when you go off the diet.
My weight fluctuating up and down is also a sign of flares of inflammation from all the toxicity.  I eat something that wouldn't usually set me off and suddenly I'm retaining five pounds of water.  After a couple of days, it lets up and my weight goes back down.  It is disheartening but not the result of anything I'm doing wrong which is an entirely new concept for me.
So, what do we do now?  Well, starting Tuesday, I'm going to go on a fairly drastic cleanse for a few days and then I'll slowly start to add back foods that are very non-allergenic.  Dr. Rothfeld is hoping it will clear out the existing toxins and, maybe, teach my body to clear them rather than consistently trying to put them back into fat.  First thing Tuesday morning, they are taking a bunch of blood for allergy testing so that when I go back on a normal diet, I can avoid foods that are going toxic in my body to begin with.  The cleanse is going to be fairly drastic for me, though not as drastic as a lot of cleanses I've heard about.  The hard part is that it's going to make all my symptoms worse in the short term before things start to get better.  I'll deal with it because I've got to break my body out of this cycle somehow.

Saturday Stats

Miles ridden this week:  100
Average calories per day: 1996
Pounds lost: 1
Current weight: 245.5 lbs (111.6 kg)
Total weight loss since 3/26/10: 45.5 lbs.

I'm very surprised to have lost a pound considering the loop-da-loops my weight has been doing this week.  I was up over five pounds on Tuesday (more on that in the next post).  I'm not complaining, though.

So Tired

I am so tired today.  I didn't start the day tired but then I rode almost 30 miles.  Now, I'm really tired and considering taking a nap on the couch even though the shop's open.
I do this to myself a lot.  I love riding so much that I use all my energy to ride and then other things I should be doing don't get done.  Have you seen my yard this summer?  Wild kingdom.  My kitchen and bedroom?  Getting ready to cut them off and throw them away.  I really need to find some balance between how much riding I do and how much time I spend doing other things.  I'm just so desperate to make the most of the summer while it lasts.  I can always clean in the winter, right?